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Proposes to treat social law contracts by covering the two most important aspects of the contract of employment, and also the collective agreement. Covers the contract of employment in full with all the integral laws explained as required, including its characteristics, written particulars, sources or regulations, with regard to employers, are also covered. Lengthy coverage of the collective agreement is also included, showing legal as well as moral (!) requirements, also included are cases in law that are covered in depth.

There are ten universal principles of United Nations Global Compact in four areas namely human rights, labour, environmental and anti-corruption, and this chapter will explore the sixth principle of labour standard on elimination of discrimination in employment and occupation, in particular the doctrine of constructive dismissal in Malaysian labour relations. Constructive dismissal is creating a new challenge in labour relation in Malaysia.

This chapter specifically analyses some of the constructive dismissal awards and its implication to labour relations in Malaysia. The methodology employed in this chapter is the analysis of case laws using criterion-based sampling from the Industrial and Superior Court awards on constructive dismissal.

There has been an increasing number of awards on constructive dismissal made by the Malaysian Industrial Court over the last nine years. From the year 2009–2013, the Industrial Court has made 663 awards on constructive dismissal, mostly against employers. With compensation awarded to each employee amounted to as much as 24 months of back-pay salary plus a month’s pay for every year of service, employers can no longer neglect this pressing issue.

The concept of constructive dismissal falls within the purview of section 20 of the Industrial Relations Act 1967 in Malaysia. Constructive dismissal is a ‘deemed dismissal’ if an employer is guilty of a breach of the employment contract which goes to the root of the contract. It arises when a workman terminates his/her contract of employment and considers himself/herself discharged from further obligations because of the employer’s conduct.

With a good understanding of the constructive dismissal awards, it is expected that organizations will manage and treat their human resources as their greatest assets and prevent constructive dismissal claims from taking place. This will eventually help to improve and maintain harmonious labour relations. This chapter is likely to provide insights into the Malaysian labour relations environment for international business operations.

In the context of Malaysian labour relations, studies on constructive dismissal are limited as it is considered as a new area and a specific area of study. This chapter therefore hopes to fill the existing gap in the literature, to highlight some of the recent awards and lessons to prevent constructive dismissal claims from taking place and generally to contribute to the constructive dismissal literature.

As any organisation chart illustrates, two essential features of organisations are formal authority and division of labour. “Formal authority” specifies those individuals and positions which have institutionalised power over others, while “division of labour” specifies those individuals and positions who are responsible for certain tasks in an organisation. In these respects organisations are a reflection of their environmental contexts of which class is a major feature (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980). Broadly speaking what emerges in organisations are two classes of participants. One such class is represented by those who own the means of production (or capital) while the other such class is represented by those who own labour. This difference in capital ownership leads to disparities in the rights, powers and privileges—prerogatives—of the two classes (Clegg and Dunkerley, 1980). In practice, however, the capitalists are represented in organisations by “the management” who act as their agents. Thus the active participants in organisations become “management” and “labour” (Strauss and Rosenstein, 1970). Management with its power base grounded in its role as the owner's agent becomes the “elite” in the organisation.

Does participation equal power? The management prerogatives of employee‐owners are unequally distributed.

Various aspects of managerial and professional employees in Australia are examined in an attempt to establish if the Australian experience is similar to that reported in other countries where “management” appears to have emerged as a third force between the employers and organised labour. It is argued that the new style manager is a younger, more highly educated “professional” but that the managerial function is also changing. A survey, conducted in Australia during 1985 of senior executives and 14 large scale organisations from both the public and private sector, provides the basis for this report of the changing characteristics of managerial and professional employees in Australia. Areas explored include the proportion of managers and professionals as a percentage of the labour force; particular characteristics which are emerging; education levels and qualifications; the process governing the movement of managers within the labour market; the effect of recent legislation on remuneration systems; and the degree of union membership among managers.

This paper outlines the challenge to traditional conceptions of the managerial prerogative from organisation growth and the rise of influence of the trade unions. It argues that the central objective of the parties in industrial relations is increased control over work. It examines the reactions of line managers and personnel specialists in four companies both to pressures from trade unions and to companies' attempts to re‐design their management control systems. It concludes that there is a process of accommodation which absorbs union pressure, and that by sharing control with trade unions, management reasserts its own control. But there are problems of indentification by some line managers with this new strategy.

Authenticity/ الصحة (as-sehah) serves as a criterion or predictor variable for the purpose of a comparative theological investigation of employment relations parameters in light of social teachings from Sunni Islam and Roman Catholicism. Authenticity finds initial, shared significance in both religious traditions because of its critically important role in judgments concerning the legitimacy of source documents. It also stands in both traditions as an inspirational goal for human life.

Particular issues of theological method for cross-cultural analysis are addressed by the use of insight-based critical realism as a transcultural foundation. Workplace parameters, the minimal enabling conditions for the possibility of authentic employment relations, are then identified and compared. The authors explore shared expectations for authenticity enabling conditions in terms of the direct and indirect employer: those national laws, systems and traditions that condition the functional range of authenticity that can be actualized within national or other work settings as experienced in the direct employment contract.

The study found remarkable consistency in the minimal conditions identified by Roman Catholic and Sunni Islam social teachings for the prospects of authenticity in employment relations. These conditions addressed seven parameters: work and the concept of labor; private property; the nature of the employment contract; unions and collective bargaining; the treatment of wages; the relationship between managerial prerogative and employee participation; and the crucial role of the state as indirect employer.

Specific minimal or threshold conditions of employment are described to ensure the prospect for authenticity in modern employment relations according to religious traditions. These include just cause employment conditions, unions and collective bargaining support, some form of management consultation/Shura, a living wage and a consultative exercise of managerial prerogative.

The study offers prescriptive and analytical aid to ensure assessment of circumstances fostering authenticity in employment relations.

The method and findings are a first effort to clarify thought and aid mutual understanding for inter-faith employment circumstances based on Roman Catholic and Sunni Islam social teachings through a transcultural foundation in cognitional operations. The criterion variable specification of authenticity conditions offers a fully developed basis to support further empirical research in management spirituality, corporate social responsibility and enterprise sustainability.

In this paper analysis is made of an important development in British industrial relations; the extension of collective bargaining to include managerial level employees. The questions posed include those such as: Why are managers increasingly joining unions? What kind of union are they attracted to? How do managers behave as trade unionists and how do employers react to the development of managerial unionism on their virgin territory? In suggesting answers to such topical questions, it is argued that although some existing unions are becoming more ambitious in recruitment, managers themselves are now interested in organizing collectively to defend their employment status and declining pay differentials. It is noted that George Bain's explanation of white collar union growth is also applicable to the development of managerial unionization, and that managers' unionism is spreading from the public to the private sector, although managers may, however, have reservations about some manifestations of aggressive trade unionism. But, despite their prevailing attitudes, managers can be militant themselves and may offer a more profound challenge to employers' prerogatives than more traditional unions. It is concluded that employers may try to undermine incipient managers' unions but that in the long term these attempts are doomed to failure not least because they will be countered by public policy.

Worker participation has been broadly defined as “any process designed to increase the ability of a worker to make decisions, or influence the making of decisions, which relate either to a specific job within an organisation, or more broadly to the overall functioning of that organisation”. As this definition suggests, worker participation can take many forms. One of these is joint consultation. Joint consultation has been described as “the means whereby management and employees may together consider, and where appropriate determine, matters affecting their joint or respective interests”. Thus joint consultation may allow for the following different degrees of participation:

What is the relationship between outcomes for distressed firms and the value of managerial stockholdings in those firms? The outcomes presented are: (1) Chapter 11 reorganization; (2) acquisition/merger; (3) internal turnaround Dollar value of ownership of the firm's common stock by the firm's top managers is used to distinguish between the outcomes for distressed firms which have declining performance. The likelihood of a firm ending up in a merger with or being acquired by another private firm increases with the amount of managerial wealth invested in the firm's stock. Firms whose managers are not owners are more likely to follow an internal turnaround strategy, such as cutting costs and/or selling assets. This strategy offers non‐owner managers a greater opportunity to maintain their managerial prerogatives than does a merger or an acquisition. This outcome is consistent with agency theory, which asserts that where possible, managers act in their own best interests to the detriment of the stockholders' interests. In the context of the firm, agency theory describes the situation wherein stockholders (principals) delegate responsibility for the firm's day to day affairs to managers (agents). One key issue in agency theory is risk sharing. Managers and stockholders may prefer different outcomes for the distressed firm due to their different risk preferences. Findings of the present study suggest that managerial wealth was not a predictor of Chapter 11 reorganization in bankruptcy, but the distressed firms' strategies were affected by the aggregate dollar value of a firm's stock owned by top managers.